I worked in a fast-growing high tech company, and it was all fun and games until the CEO said, “Hey, I’m selling the company.” I only got to tell one person, my friend Diane, because Diane and I had to plan the employee communications strategy. “So anyway, Diane,” I told her, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but the company is going to be sold.”

“Well, now I know what my weekend entails,” she said. It was Friday afternoon. “Fetal position, in the bed, with Oreos.” We laughed our heads off, and I don’t think either of us laughed again for three months.

Losing your job is no picnic. Coming back to work after a period of unemployment is hard, too, and so is getting back into the workforce when you’ve been home raising kids or tending to a family member. All of it is hard. We are trained to think about what we don’t have — years of experience, or long lists of certifications, or some other left-brain metric that has zip-all to do with anything on the actual job once you get it. But most of us have drunk a lot of dogma-flavored Kool-Aid over the years. We start to believe that we are lacking, that our job search will be hard, or that we’re going to be stuck forever doing something we don’t like because it’s too hard to do anything else.

When we are in transition, it can be hard to even think about what to do next, much less to act on it. It’s a confusing and frustrating time for most of us. We know that eventually the clouds will part, but when? We don’t know how to proceed. Ironically, it’s in the time of greatest confusion that most of the learning happens, but that doesn’t make being stuck any easier while we’re experiencing it.

[media-credit name=”Andy Cross, The Denver Post” align=”alignright” width=”300″][/media-credit] Denver School of the Arts percussion student, Zach Bahn, 11-years-old, jams on the Djembe drum on the 16th St. Mall near California St. in June 2012.

A weird thing about a lot of parents is that they beam and glow when their kids get solos in orchestra, band and choir in high school, but they freak out when the same talented kid says “I want to study music in college.”

I don’t get it. You raise a kid to have pluck and self-determination, and then when the kid says “I love playing my instrument more than anything, and I want to pursue my passion as a career,” the parent flips out.

Right now is the time of year when parents call me in a frenzy of parental angst about their children’s musical aspirations. They sound panicky on the phone. A child has decided that he or she loves music, and the parent is certain the love of music is going to send an accomplished, self-directed kid straight to Skid Row. They ask me, “Am I dooming my child to a life of poverty if I let him major in music?” Read more…

My young friend Mikayla is a brilliant chickadee, and she’s been that way as long as I’ve known her. Mikayla is my daughter’s friend, and the two of them are sophomores in college now. Back when the girls were in eleventh grade, Mikayla pitched me on a summer babysitting assignment. “I can just imagine that it’s hard for you once school gets out, with your second-grader underfoot,” she wrote to me. “Do you want me to pick him up at the end of daycamp each day, take him for pizza and a dip in the rec center pool, and bring him back exhausted to have dinner and fall asleep?”

That was a summer babysitting offer I couldn’t refuse. The reason I mention it in this column is because Mikayla put the whole thing together herself; I never mentioned to her that I really like to work until five or five-thirty, or that day camps tend to end at three or three-thirty. I never told her that my workdays were truncated because of the daycamp schedule.

She put herself in my shoes as a hiring manager, if that’s the right term for a person in my situation. The truth is, I hadn’t given three seconds of thought to the idea of summer babysitting before Mikayla wrote to me. If someone had asked me the direct question, “Looking for a summer babysitter?” I would have answered, “Thanks, but no,” because summer babysitting was the last thing on my mind. Mikayla used a critical job-search technique (and consulting business-development technique, and sales technique) that I call Pain-Spotting(TM). She put herself in my shoes. She thought, “What would it be like to be a working mom with a little kid who needs attention after daycamp and has tons of energy, while that same mom has work to do and deadlines to meet?” She saw the pain first, then devised a solution. She presented the pain and her solution to me and created her own summer job. Read more…

“Trifecta,” said my friend Becky on the phone, although she lives in Colorado; if there’s a racetrack around here, it’s news to me.

“Trifecta what?” I asked her.

“I just got home from a job interview where they asked me not one, not two, but all three of the idiotic job interview questions you’re always railing about.”

“All three?” I asked her. “That’s amazing. Were these people otherwise reasonable, or was the place a petri dish full of amoebas?”
“Amoebae, I think,” said Becky. “I think ‘amoebae’ is the plural for ‘amoeba.'”

“Either way, what were these people like?” I pressed her. “Toads,” she said. “I almost didn’t go to the interview at all, because the recruiter who set up the appointment said ‘Don’t be late’ to me before she hung up. I knew then and there that I didn’t want to work with these people, but like you always say, it’s good to go on the interview and get more practice.”

“And grow your mojo,” I added. “Oh, brother!” said Becky. “This was the world’s most slam-dunk mojo-growth interview, let me tell you. As horrible as it was to talk with the toad people, it is nice to remember that I have something valuable to offer, too. It was nice to walk out of there thinking ‘If I live to be a million years old, I’ll never work for people like that.'”

I have been in banking for almost twenty years, but recently I lost my position. I have an appetite to try for something outside of banking, but I don’t know if it’s feasible at my age. I’m 52 now and I worry that I’m too old to make a career change. What would you suggest?

Thanks,

Frances

Dear Frances,

Congratulations on your 2013 reinvention! I know it’s not the easiest or least stressful thing in the world to navigate a new-millennium job hunt, but I am excited about your 2013 career adventure. For starters, 52 is not too old for very much, careerwise — I can only think of two examples (playing major league baseball and dancing in the New York City Ballet). You can change careers this year. That is no problem. The thornier part (but still not anything you couldn’t handle) will be zeroing in on your next, best professional move. Read more…

Oh geez, I thought as I answered my office phone, first thing this morning. A PR call at eight a.m.? The young man on the phone was trying to sell me on writing a column about his company’s career-path-calculating software. This was not the call I would have picked to start my day, but the universe is in charge, not me, so I gritted my teeth and stuck with it.

“You know,” I said, “I’m not a fan of instruments and assessments that purport to tell people what they should do for a living.” The young man halted in his pitchman’s spiel. “What?” he asked. “Don’t you think an instrument like ours will do a better job of picking a person’s career path than the person will do, himself?”

“I think that may appear to be true,” I said, “only because it is very hard for most of us (perhaps all of us) to get outside ourselves enough to have a clear perspective on our own situations. However, our friends do a great job of telling us what we’re good at and where we shine. When we can take time to listen to our creative right brains and our bodies, listen to our friends and think about where we’re happiest at work, we can pick perfectly wonderful career paths. I don’t trust any algorithm to do that work. That’s about as human a task as we could imagine. Why would we entrust it to an equation?” Read more…

I was sitting in front of the Christmas tree a couple of weeks ago, thinking about MBAs and job hunting. I have a soft spot for folks in full-time graduate programs, because it’s hard to spend two years with your brain split down the middle. When you go back to school to improve your career-type marketability, you have to study hard in order to get good grades and learn everything you can. You’re expected to be focused on your studies. At the same time, you’ve got to keep one eye on the horizon — on your post-graduation job search, that is – which can be unnerving, since the full-time program doesn’t allow you to do lots of things that you’d do if you were actively job-hunting right now. Read more…

I’m sure the guy is dead now, whoever he was, but I have a major bone to pick with whoever invented resumes. What a horrible idea! Who could expect us to get twenty, thirty or sixty years of awesome life and work experience across in a two-page document? The idea of a resume itself is what my sporty friends would call a non-starter.

On top of the sucktastic two-page resume format, we’ve got other obstacles in our way when we try to get across our power and heft on the job hunt. Most of us have been taught to write our resumes in a style we could only call Corporate Zombiespeak. It’s the worst. We’re taught to describe ourselves as Results-Oriented Professionals and Motivated Self-Starters, whatever the heck those awful terms mean. We’re taught to talk about our Skills and Competencies.Read more…

Five or six years ago, I got a call from a Marketing VP who was antsy in her job. “I need to think about broadening my horizons,” she said. “For starters, I need to start networking more.” “What kind of networking do you do now?” I asked her. “None,” she said. “I know the people I work with, and my friends outside of work, and that’s it.”

We put together a plan for the Marketing VP’s career exploration. Her first assignment was to go to a large networking event; we went together, and chatted with a dozen people there. “That was really fun,” said the VP as we left. “I guess I thought that when you network, you have to have a purpose in mind – either you need a job, or you’re trolling for business.” “Heck, no!” I exclaimed. “That’s not networking, that’s transacting business. Networking is just talking, and seeing whether glue forms.” “We built up a lot of glue tonight!” she said. It was true; we had. Read more…

Cassandra had been looking for a job for three or four months when she chatted with me after a presentation I gave on new-millennium job hunting. “I had the most upsetting experience recently,” she said. “I interviewed for a Marketing job, and I had every qualification listed in the ad. I could tell, though, that I was losing the two interviewers during the interviews. I couldn’t keep their attention.”

“Who were these guys?” I asked her. “They’re two founders who started an agency together,” she said. “I got about fifty minutes with the first one and then maybe thirty-five with the second guy. The conversations were just off, a little. I was trying to talk about my experience, and I couldn’t get them excited about anything.” Inwardly I grimaced.Read more…

Liz Ryan is a former Fortune 500 HR executive and the CEO of Human Workplace, an online community and consulting firm focused on reinventing work and career education. She is working with the Denver Post to bring the best expert advice on work place issues and tips to improve your career. Note: Liz Ryan was selected for her expertise, but her opinions are solely her own. We are not endorsing or advocating her business.